It is common practice to transport hay and other agricultural products from one location to another as needed. Hay is usually baled into large cylindrical bales secured with twine that will often weigh several hundred kilograms depending on its size and moisture content. It is well known that moving these bales with purely manual labor is very difficult and as a result a mechanical apparatus to retrieve, transport and unload these most hay bales is required.
In the past, the collection and stacking of hay bales is typically achieved with the use of various lifting and transporting equipment and the simultaneous work of at least two operators. For example, when collecting round hay bales in a field, one operator may drive a tractor with an attached flat bed trailer and a second operator will follow with a forklift or other appropriate lifting equipment. The first tractor moves the flatbed trailer close to one or more hay bale(s), pausing to let the forklift or other appropriate lifting equipment stack the hay bale(s) on the flatbed trailer. This method for the collection and stacking of hay bales is undesirable as it requires the labor of two operators and requires two pieces farm equipment.
Alternatively, farmers may choose to collect and stack hay bales with a single towing system. In this case, the farmer will typically tow a flat bed trailer with a tractor having a front-end forklift or other appropriate lifting device. This method requires the operator to sequentially stop at select areas in the fields, manually disconnect the trailer, use the forklift to load and stack nearby bale(s) onto the flat bed trailer and then reconnect the flat bed trailer before continuing to the next area where a number of bales may be located. While this collection method can eliminate a second operator, this method is undesirable as it is time consuming and laborious for one person to complete.
Furthermore, once all hay bales have been collected and transported to a desired unloading or storage area, the process of offloading any hay bales from a flat bed trailer requires a forklift or other appropriate lifting equipment and like the loading processes described above is time-consuming.
Further still, forklifts or other lifting equipment will often cause damage to hay bales. For example, a forklift may pierce the hay bale or sever any attachments holding the bale together such that additional work may be required to repair or remove damaged bales.
Moreover, farmers may cover hay bales in a wrapping material when producing haylage, silage or the like. For the fermentation of silage, haylage or the like to be effective, the wrapping must remain intact. Often forklifts and other appropriate lifting equipment handles bales roughly resulting in tears, punctures or the like that inhibit the formation of silage, haylage or the like.
As a result, there has been a need for hay bale collection equipment allowing a single operator to efficiently move around a field collecting multiple hay bales without getting out of their tractor and that provides a reliable but simple system that minimizes the risk of damage to a hay bale.
A review of the prior art indicates that while various systems for collecting and transporting hay bales have been provided in the past, there continues to be a need for new designs of such systems that provide improvements over these past systems. For example, the prior art shows various hay bale collection and lifting systems including U.S. Pat. No. 4,459,075, U.S. Pat. No. 6,935,827, US Patent Application 2003/0031533, U.S. Pat. No. 6,478,522, U.S. Pat. No. 7,004,706, U.S. Pat. No. 5,333,981, U.S. Pat. No. 4,329,102, U.S. Pat. No. 4,076,138, U.S. Pat. No. 5,062,757, U.S. Pat. No. 7,252,190, US Patent Application 2006/004657, U.S. Pat. No. 7,241,098, U.S. Pat. No. 6,312,205, U.S. Pat. No. 7,090,456, and U.S. Pat. No. 7,210,888.